Phantom Banjo (23 page)

But the beat was infectious and sexy, and it
started Gussie to tapping her toe, then stomping her foot, and
before she knew it she was on her feet dancing, snapping her
fingers, clapping her hands. When Soul stopped she waited
expectantly, watching the stage while the drum machine thudded out
the seconds.

The kids on stage, some of whom weren't kids
at all but closer to her age, conferred hurriedly, tried a couple
of things, and couldn't seem to find anything they could all
remember. At any other time, Gus thought loyally, they could have
blown the machinery off the stage, but from what Willie said, a big
chunk of the common repertoire had somehow been hacked away by
Sam's death.

Off to one side, Gussie noticed the blond
fellow Anna Mae had been headed for earlier eyeing Willie, as if
waiting to see what he'd do. The man hadn't taken sides or tried to
sing along or seemed moved by the rock beat. Maybe he was a
promoter—businessman or something. His hair was cropped close and
he had a no-nonsense look about him, and seemed to be sizing up
everybody there, but especially Willie.

Gussie had been sweating from every pore, so
hot that she thought she'd just drip clean away into a little
greasy puddle, but all of a sudden a breeze blew up, unsticking the
hairs from the sweat on her bare arms, evaporating the sweat, and
raising goosebumps all over her.

Black roiling clouds clustered over to the
north, by the river, low on the horizon. And was that rumbling
sound the drum machine or thunder?

Anna Mae looked up sharply, scowled, and
signaled Sylvia. Together they began hauling a tarp over the
trellis-like structure that roofed the half of the deck nearest the
house and tied the ends to poles. All of the musicians were now in
shadow, but the equipment was protected from rain.

"You guys are fizzling out," Soul laughed.
"But you're not giving it your best shot. Everybody ain't here. I
still see lots of instruments I could win out there in the
audience. Come on, my music is better and you know it. Hell, you
can't even remember your own songs. How good can they be
anyway?"

The others were still arguing among
themselves. Havelock wanted to sing a traditional Nova Scotian
fishing song but it was so obscure that nobody else knew it to sing
backup.

The drum machine pounded to a stop and Duck
jumped to his feet and said, "Give up, then, dammit! Admit it! I
win."

"How immature and unenlightened," Juli said
in the silence.

And from offstage, where Willie was standing,
debating about whether to play or not, the banjo lying propped up
on the log beside him played "John Henry."

Brose listened for a second, then leaned into
the microphone and said, "We ain't licked yet. MacKai, you got me
into this shit. You gonna strap that instrument on and get your ass
up here or just stand around lookin' decorative all day?" Then,
without waiting for an answer, Brose brushed past Soul, who was
standing in a victorious pose beside the keyboard, and usurped his
place at the keys.

CHAPTER 11

" 'Scuse me, my man," Brose said over his
shoulder to Duck Soul, "but I ain't buyin' into this lowly
manchild-versus-the-machine shit and I don't intend to die with no
hammer in my hand. You have done arrogated all my superior sexual
prowess I intend to let you arrogate. 'Less I'm mistaken, our bet
ain't about who is the hottest musician or who has the most
firepower, instrument-wise. It's about who has the best music. Now
stand aside, boy, while my accompanist and I show you how it's
done."

He lit into the synthesizer with the skill of
a master.

Willie didn't know if he was more astounded
at the way Brose was tickling the keys or the way the banjo seemed
to actually be guiding his own fingers into the tune of "John
Henry."

Brose winked at him.

"I didn't know you could play one of these
things," Willie said into the microphone so Brose could hear him
over the wails of the synthesizer.

"Lot you don't know about me," Brose said
into his own mike. "Anytime you go to teach kids somethin' it's a
two-way education."

Just to show he meant it, he added a heavy
metal passage that fit right in with the steel-driving man.

Soul, who was finally catching on that
he was being outgunned with his own weapon, protested, "S'posed to
be a song, bro. Not just a tune.
I
sang a song."

"Did you now?"

The steel drummer, his smallest drum slung
from a strap around his neck and his drumsticks in his hands, edged
over to them. "I can sing that song. The other guys on Amtrak think
I'm a nut for collecting old railroad songs but I tell them it's
something my parents learned in the internment camps and that shuts
them up."

With a lot of clanging, he bent down to sing
into the mike, faltered for a moment, then sang "John Henry" in
Japanese.

Soul started to stammer out a protest but
Brose interjected between verses, "Hey, man, it don't have to be in
English to be a folk song and anyway, everybody knows anything
comes out of bein' incarcerated is cool." He turned to the drummer,
who was providing steam-hammer effects in a steady bong even as the
conversation continued, "Okay, my man, teach us the chorus and
everybody sing along."

Pretty soon Gussie was singing so hard she
scarcely noticed the bite of the wind that bowed the tarp over the
musicians so that it swelled with the gusts and emptied with a
sharp flap. She hadn't known she could sing in Japanese but
actually the words were a little like Spanish ones, and she sang
with a strong Tex-Mex accent.

Meanwhile a cataract of cloud filmed the
bright blue lens of the sky and blotted out the summer sun
lingering into the evening. Close behind boiled a great muscle of
storm, angry gray clouds moldering to rotten black, bloated with
rain and electricity.

As they swarmed over the stage, the little
alligator clamp lights beamed out of the darkness, focusing on
Brose as the drummer. Juli and all the others stepped back and he
drove into the bridge on a keyboard solo, singing into the voice
mike in English, "John Henry was a steel-drivin' man, oh, Lord,
John Henry was a steel-drivin' man."

The lightning struck like a snake too damned
crooked to rattle a warning. Maybe the clapping hands and the
amplified keyboard drowned out the first thunderclap but then,
maybe it never came. Because one minute it was so windy and dark
about all you could clearly see was the little stage lights
bouncing off Brose's snaggle teeth and his eyeballs and the next
the light seared your eyes so bright it cut clean through closed
eyelids and printed itself on your brain, a fork of lightning
diving straight for the microphone.

A nuclear bomb detonated inside Gussie's
head, an explosion of grating, grinding noise that was more than
her ears could bear. She felt her hair stand straight up as her
skull split apart with it, then the ground slammed into her
face.

Millions of icy needles exploded over her
body as the rain hit and she struggled back up to her elbows,
trying to support her head with her hands. Her brain pounded louder
than John Henry's hammer and the steam hammer put together and the
ghostly image of the lightning flash repeated again and again in
front of her eyes, superimposing itself on the melee on the
stage.

People's mouths gaped open, their faces
contorted with fear, and she assumed they were screaming, though
she couldn't actually hear them. It was like watching a silent
movie. She felt rather than heard the death noises of the sound
equipment as too much power snapped wires and blew chips and sent
sparks flying. The drummer leaped off the stage and landed
jackknifed over his drum. Willie looked as if he were still in
flight, his belly supported by Juli's back, one knee cocked as if
he were running, the banjo outflung and his knuckles tight around
the neck. Brose lay beneath Willie and Juli. Little drifts of smoke
rose from the three of them, or maybe, Gussie prayed, oh, maybe it
was only from the wires that jumped, writhed, and sparked all
across the stage, restrained by fetters of duct tape placed at
strategic intervals.

People leaped drunkenly to the ground from
the stage and staggered around, or wobbled around the yard, opening
their mouths as if they were trying to pop their ears, but Willie
and the others didn't move. Sparks flew from the keyboard. Duck
Soul hunkered over to one side of the stage, his arm wrapped
protectively around a crying girl.

At the edge of the stage Anna Mae stood
poised for a split second like a chicken hawk searching for prey as
her eyes swept the blast-stunned people, the sheets of rain dumping
into the tarp, turning the front yard into streamlets and puddles
and pools, and back to the wires jumping onstage. She looked madder
than ever, Gussie thought. Damn, that woman can look pissed off
about anything. But then with a flick of wet black hair she
sprinted into her house. Nice that somebody has somewhere warm and
dry to go, Gussie thought nastily.

The wind still tried to blow at the tarp, but
it was so full of water all it did was spill little cascades over
the edge. It was tied by two pieces of nylon cord to the poles at
the front of the stage, and those poles already bowed with a
combination of the weight of rainwater in the tarp and the
softening to mud of the ground in which they were planted. Onstage,
Willie stirred.

"Jesus, God almighty," Gussie said aloud,
though her voice sounded only in one ear and then as if it were
coming from a great distance. If the poles gave and the tarp dumped
that load of water onto those hot wires, Willie and the others
still trapped onstage would be electrocuted. Faron Randolph was
hauling one of the gospel singers offstage and Willie raised his
head, looked around, then clenched himself across the others to
shield them. It wouldn't work that way. Gussie had no desire to be
electrocuted but she didn't intend to have to live with the memory
of her friends frying in front of her when she might have prevented
it either.

She threw down the Mexican bag she'd been
vainly trying to cover her head with and swayed to her feet. Stars
still burst in front of her eyes between her and the stage as she
lurched toward it. Still standing on the ground, she leaned across
the front of the deck and tugged at Willie's pant leg. He looked up
again, toward her, but didn't seem to grasp what she wanted. In for
a penny, in for a pound, she thought to herself, and climbed up
onto the deck, picking her way through the wires to Willie, and
tried to pull him up by the armpits.

He nearly threw her backward as he hauled
himself to his feet but her dancer's coordination paid off and she
skipped aside to reach for Juli.

But at that point Brose reared up, dumping
Juli onto her feet. He shook his head like an angry bull and rose
to his knees, casting a quizzical look first at Willie, then at
Gus. Smoke curled up from the black-singed ends of his red hair.
Willie leaped from the stage, banjo still in hand, and reached
toward them with his other hand. Gussie turned Juli onto her back.
Her face was red as if she'd been sunburned, with no lashes or
brows and her bangs all singed away. Gus felt a pocket of pressure
pop from one ear and heard thunder rumble, more distant now, along
with the crackle and hiss of electricity and rain, the creak of
tent poles straining.

Brose lumbered to his feet and Gussie shot a
steadying hand toward him, but not before the top of his head
touched the low belly of the water-pregnant tarp and one of the
poles skidded sideways.

He jumped for it as the edge of the tarp
gave, folding under a torrent of water that crashed onto the stage,
over him, over the wires, splashing toward her and Juli.

She knelt there stupidly waiting to die,
watching the water, wondering indignantly who in the hell was going
to help Lettie and Mic now. She was still waiting, watching Brose
double back to reach for her and Juli, when Anna Mae calmly walked
up to her from the back of the stage and asked, "Is she okay?"
nodding down at Juli.

"How in the hell should I know?" Gussie asked
querulously. "I thought we were both fried."

"I cut the power."

"About time," Gussie snapped, then realized
she was shaking like she needed a drink worse than she had ever
needed a drink in her life. Angry with her unsteady hand, she
grasped Juli's shoulder. Her fingers seemed to have trouble
gripping.

"Come on, girl," she said to Juli. To Anna
Mae she said, "Looks like it knocked her out."

Willie crawled back up onstage. "Whatever you
do, don't give her a drink," he rasped. "Has anybody called the
paramedics? There are people seriously hurt out there."

Juli's eyes opened. "Owww," she moaned. "What
the hell?"

"It's okay, kiddo," Gussie said. "You can now
tell people lightning won't dare strike you because it never
strikes twice in the same place."

The limp attempt at a joke was lost on Juli
who asked, "What? What did you say?"

"Just funnin' you, honey."

" 'Scuse me? What did you say?" Juli's voice
came out high and funny as she said, "I can't hear a damn word
anybody's—oh, God." She rose drunkenly as a cobra dancing to a
third-rate flute player. "Oh, shit." She started to shake her head
and sucked her breath in with pain. Very carefully she returned her
head to a forward position looking as if she was afraid if she
moved it again she'd tear it right off. She gently tapped the heel
of her hand against the side of her head above each ear. "It's like
my ears are trying to pop but can't," she complained.

"Oh, sure, honey, that happened to me too
but—" Gussie started to tell her that it would go away in a
minute.